Unicode to Discuss Proposals for Emoji Related to Science, Planets and Hair

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Unicode to Discuss Proposals for Emoji Related to Science, Planets and Hair

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UTC151, the quarterly Unicode Technical Committee meeting, is scheduled to take place next week, where proposals for including emoji related to science, planets and hair will be discussed. According to Emojipedia, Emoji 5.0 updates, which includes the final 2017 emoji list, is also on the emoji agenda this month.

While the emoji list for this year was finalized in March, the rest of the standard is still being worked on.

Science is on the agenda at UTC with an emoji proposal for a neuron, petri dish, DNA, and other science-related emojis. The same proposal makes the case for a crater, “warming earth”, and landslide among the characters listed. A separate proposal seeks to add emojis for each of the planets in our solar system.

The planet emoji sequences would be represented with a combination of U+1F310 GLOBE WITH MERIDIANS and combined as a sequence with ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ) and existing Unicode code points for planetary symbols. This would allow for the representation of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Meanwhile, progress is being made on the proposal for redhead emojis, which has been expanded to include curly hair, baldness, and white hair. Other topics up for discussion include an assessment of ways to enable nearly every emoji to have a gender neutral or gender inclusive variant, evil eye symbol, as well as proposals to add additional characters.

UTC 151will be held between May 8-12 at Adobe Systems Inc. in San Jose, California.